B. B. King

Not one of his ten planets sits in an air sign. Earth takes five and water four, with a single one in fire, and five of the ten are mutable. Four planets sit in Virgo, spread across seventeen degrees of it, and his Moon is one of them with its sign certain at seven degrees. Uranus was the only retrograde planet. The record says King played around two hundred and fifty shows a year into his seventies, on a guitar he called Lucille after a fire in a dance hall, and that he never learned to play and sing at the same time.

The Moon sits conjunct Mercury at under half a degree inside that Virgo group, and the reading is that thought and mood are the same weather: somebody who talks in order to understand how they feel, with a memory unusually tied to emotion. In a blues musician that is very close to a description of the form itself, which is why it is worth stating and discounting in the same breath. The vocabulary was written without any idea what he played, and the fit is a coincidence of subject matter rather than a finding.

Four planets in Virgo is the structural half, and Virgo is the sign built on doing something properly and being useful. Two hundred and fifty shows a year, sustained into a man's seventies, is craft treated as a working week rather than as an occasion. The record's last fact belongs beside it: a limitation stated plainly as a limitation, by a record that otherwise gives only a volume of work and the name of a guitar.

The Sun sits in direct opposition to Uranus at just over a fifth of a degree, read as restlessness, abrupt reversals of direction, and a pattern of leaving things just before they mature. A quarter of a thousand performances a year for decades contradicts all three of those flatly, which makes it the clearest miss in the chart. No planet at all in air is a count worth a line and no conclusion. He died at Las Vegas on 14 May 2015, at eighty nine. The transiting Sun stood in easy contact with its own birth place at under four tenths of a degree, which is the calendar again: he died about eight months after his birthday, and eight months is two thirds of a circle. The Moon was at its last quarter and fifteen per cent lit.